No Audio from DVD Drive

[DennisP]

Just assembled a system. Installed a Siny SATA DVD.CD drive. Has power cable plud and SATA plug.....no audio cable out of the DVD player. Been told it's not necessary....however I play DVD's and get no sound.

I'm using headphones in the front jacks...but no sound at all. I get windows start and shout down sounds.

I'm confused.....

 

[cjl]

It's a problem with the sound, and it has nothing to do with the DVD player. The audio on DVDs is simply data - the sound card in your computer processes it and then outputs it. If you store music on your hard drive, you don't need an audio cable from the hard drive to hear it - it's the same kind of thing.

As for why you have no audio, have you tried more than one player software? For example, have you tried both Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center? You could download a free player like VLC as well. Also, make sure the sound on the DVD isn't set to DTS, as many internal sound cards cannot decode DTS.

 

[techgeek]

If you are using Windows Media Player, go to Tools > Options. Select the DVD tab and then click the Advanced Button. You should see what vendor is supplying the audio codec used to play back DVD audio as Windows XP doesn't support DVD playback on it's own, it comes from third party providers. For instance mine is InterVideo. What you are looking for is that there is a codec and this it is reported.

If you are worried about audio in general, you could also put in a CD and see if it plays it.

As for audio cables going from you DVD/CD drive to your sound card, that hasn't been needed for many years. The audio information is passed digitally to your sound card. DVD's in specific require that the audio and video streams be decoded by whatever codec your system is using. If you are referring to the an audio jack on the DVD player itself, you won't hear DVD audio there, because it needs to be decoded first and that is done by your computer and not the drive itself. You should hear regular CD audio there though.

If you have any sort of codec problem, you can try a program call GSpot (I know funny name). It can help troubleshoot problems with codecs, and I identify what stream is using which codec.

 

[DennisP]

Hey guys, Thanks for the replies. This one had me stumped for a while...kinda still does.

I'm running XP Home.....

At first DVD's would pay video but no sound through the Media player that came with Windows. I had a Disk with PowerDVD SE 4.0 that I use in Win2K...so I figured I install that and use it instead of the Media player that came with XP. Anyway, after it installed the DVD's wouldn''t play at all (Video or audio)...message said my resolution was too set to high or my color was too high. I knew different..although I did try and change them to no avail. Uninstalled PowerDVD and now media player would not play the video on a DVD ...error code that referred me to MS and of course...no remedy available. Figured I'll download Media Player 11.....same problem as the version that came with XP. Last resort..I'll re-install PowerDVD hoping that whatever driver that was removed when I uninstalled it before would be replaced. Fortunately, Media player 11 played the Video and the sound for the DVD after I did this. I deleted the Icon for Power DVD and will use Media Player 11 to play movies.

Thinking of Buying the new version of NERO (8) to use with XP and Vista on my Laptop. Nero 8 has a DVD player in their software package. I had been using Nero 6 and really like it....but won't work in Vista.

Cheers

 

[techgeek]

Nearly all commercial DVD software makes there codecs available to Windows Media Player (Nero, PowerDVD, Cyberlink, etc) so you don't have to use their player to watch DVD. Of course this information only pertains to Windows XP and earlier as Windows Vista provides out of the box support for DVD's.

It's good to hear that you finally sorted it out.